Region exploring reduction and diversion of food scraps

Saturday

Nov 14, 2015 at 10:52 PMNov 14, 2015 at 10:52 PM

For the Bates family, coffee and eggs mean far more than breakfast.

"Composting is a family affair at the Bates house," said Wayne Bates.

Wayne is the chairman of the Ashland Sustainability Committee. Bates, his wife Kathy and their sons Finnian and Ronan have been composting for close to five years. They started to aid Wayne's garden beds with powerful nutrient-rich soil in the spring and summer, but they continued for much bigger reasons.

"I like that the waste is being taken out of the trash and going back to the earth, where it came from," said Kathy Bates.

Composting, a longtime traditional gardener’s secret, is garnering new attention in the state, thanks to recent legislation focused on reducing food waste.

In 2014, Massachusetts instituted a commercial food waste ban, making it illegal for institutions and organizations that throw away one ton or more of food a week to dispose of their organic materials in a landfill.

Instead of throwing organic food away (mostly fruits and vegetables), most restaurants, supermarkets, colleges and hospitals across the state now use alternative methods to get rid of their food waste, including composting some and donating food that's edible.

Americans throw away a staggering 133 billion pounds of food per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For a family of four, that works out to $1,500 a year spent on wasted food.

These numbers, among others, have spurred a movement to reduce and divert food waste.

In September, the Agriculture Department launched a nationwide goal to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

Locally, states, municipalities and residents are taking a closer look at their food waste impacts.

Landfills were specifically targeted by the ban because of a lack of suitable land and concerns about the release of methane and other gases into the atmosphere when food decomposes.

To help businesses with the new legislation, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) adopted the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy – a pyramid of preferred ways to dispose of or divert food waste.

Source Reduction

According to the hierarchy, the preferred way to dispose of food waste is to produce less of it in the first place. In this "source reduction" phase, the idea is to monitor prep cook production to produce as little waste as possible.

At Framingham State University, Dining Services workers have been using a food waste tracking and reporting program for the last three years called LeanPath, which allows users to track where different types of food waste end up after it leaves the dining hall.

For example, Dining Services personnel can track where vegetables go. Are there more cucumber peels in the compost bin or whole cucumbers in food donation boxes? Does this mean too many cucumbers are being purchased and ending up as food waste?

"As the saying goes, if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it," said Ralph Eddy, director of Dining Services. "I see LeanPath as more of an analytical tool that allows us to observe trends and sources of food waste. It measures the bottom of the food funnel and provides us with some of the information needed to affect changes higher in the funnel and ultimately reduce the amount of food that makes it to the 'potential' waste category."

Feed Hungry People

Of course, no place regularly selling or producing food can entirely eliminate its organic waste. The next step, according to the EPA Hierarchy, would be to donate edible, unspoiled food to those in need.

Food waste can fall into two categories: material that is not fit for human consumption, such as rotten vegetables or spoiled products, and material that is still safe to eat, like day-old bread or vegetables with blemishes. The second category, also known as cosmetic food waste, makes up a huge portion of the waste produced by supermarkets and grocery stores.

Lovin' Spoonfuls, a Brookline-based food rescue service, has come up with a solution to distribute cosmetic food waste to where it is most needed.

Most grocery stores have regulations that determine how long certain products can be available for public purchase. Some of these guidelines are not directly in line with product shelf dates, particularly for fruits and vegetables. Sometimes, a bruise or tear can take fruits and vegetables off the shelves for cosmetic reasons, despite the products still being safe to eat.

This is where Lovin' Spoonfuls comes in. Operations director Lauren Palumbo said drivers pick up 30,000 pounds of food per week and 1.3 million pounds each year in the metro Boston area.

Each day, drivers in refrigerated trucks pick up vegetables, fruits, bread, bakery products, pre-made sandwiches and salads, meat and dairy items from grocery stores, supermarkets and farms and donate them to local food pantries and shelters free of charge – food that traditionally would have been thrown away.

"We're picking up products that are already in the retail stream and not going to be sold for whatever reason," said Palumbo.

Thanks to funding from the MetroWest Health Foundation partnered with the Sudbury Foundation, the Middlesex Savings Charitable Foundation and the Foundation for MetroWest, Lovin' Spoonfuls will be expanding its pick-up and donation services to MetroWest early next near.

Feed Animals

When feeding people isn’t an option, the USDA hierarchy suggests feeding farm animals. Some food waste, such as food trimmings, can't be rescued or safely consumed by humans.

Natick’s Walnut Hill School for the Arts, where reducing food waste is a priority, is attacking the food waste problem on two fronts.

Each week, dining services donates a portion of the school's pre-consumer food waste - the parts and peels of things such as fruits and vegetables that aren't eaten by people - to Natick Community Organic Farm to feed the farm's animals.

In addition, the campus' single dining hall has been composting all leftover food for the last three years. Melissa Joyce, the director of sustainability and operations, estimates the 400 people on Walnut Hill's campus produce about eight to 10, 20-pound buckets of food waste.

Each week, an independent solid waste service picks up the food waste and hauls it to a compost farm. The school does not currently receive any compost from its food waste.

"The headmaster's wife was really interested in increasing sustainability practices in our facilities and it's just grown from there," said Joyce. "We're now looking for ways to expand this to other buildings on campus."

Industrial Uses

Food waste on farms isn't just going to the animals - it can also contribute to heating or lighting people’s homes.

The fourth lowest level on the USDA hierarchy is industrial uses, including diverting food waste to be used in anaerobic digestion, the natural breakdown of organic material in an oxygen-free environment. The process produces a biogas that is converted into electricity or heat.

There are several anaerobic digestion sites in Massachusetts, including the Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant in Winthrop and Jordan's Dairy Farm in Rutland.

Recently, Jordan's Dairy Farm began working with Framingham's Whole Foods to collect food waste in a first-of-its-kind partnership in MetroWest to help produce energy using a Grind2Energy system.

According to Karen Franczyk, Whole Foods green mission coordinator of the North Atlantic region, the company has used the Grind2Energy system in its Andover location for a year and a half, but the Framingham location is the first Whole Foods store in MetroWest to have a Grind2Energy machine.

Grind2Energy works like a garbage disposal. Food waste is placed in the table-shaped sink and a grinder at one end of the machine turns the food waste into a pulp. The pulp is transported through pipes outside the store into a storage container.

In Framingham, the substance is donated to Jordan's Dairy Farm where it’s mixed with cow manure and liquid dairy waste and put into the farm's anaerobic digesters. The biogas released from the store's food waste decomposition is used to make electricity.

The Grind2Energy machine will be able to turn all of the Framingham location's food waste, including meat and some paper products, into pulp. Franczyk expects the store to deliver 2,500 to 2,800 gallons of pulp to Jordan's Dairy every two weeks.

"We compost in all our stores and it's always been a focus, regardless of the waste ban," said Franczyk. "It's a part of our core values as a company."

Composting

The final level on the USDA hierarchy pyramid is composting. In composting, materials such as coffee grounds, fruit, vegetables, manure and leaves are mixed and allowed to decompose to produce a nutrient-rich soil.

At Hidden Acres Composting in Medway, fourth-generation farmer Jimmy Cassidy mixes food waste with leaves and manure to produce compost, though he won’t say what his exact proportions are in order to avoid tipping off his competition.

Cassidy is no stranger to composting. His great-grandfather started composting leaves and manure at the turn of the 20th century and Cassidy kicked off his own efforts just over a year ago after the commercial food waste ban went into effect.

He estimates he takes 20 to 25 tons of food waste per week from colleges, universities and municipalities in MetroWest. Although the service is mostly commercial pickups, he hopes to expand more on the residential side as funds become available.

"I thought it was a good idea and you really see how much we waste," said Cassidy. "We throw away a lot of food."

Composting isn’t just for businesses. Natick is looking to get in the game to help residents compost their household food waste.

A pilot curbside compost program is set to begin in the spring. Residents participating in the pilot would collect all their food waste and put it in a designated compost bin at their curb. On trash day, a compost-specific truck would pick up the food waste and haul it to a compost facility.

Participating residents would receive a counter-top compost container, a curbside container and food bags to place the food waste in before putting it on the curb.

According to Jillian Wilson-Martin, Natick's sustainability coordinator, a community outreach survey completed this year showed 1,000 Natick residents would participate in a curbside compost program focused on food waste.

"Our intent is to divert waste from the incinerator and turn it into valuable soil," said Wilson-Martin.

Composting is also being explored in Ashland where compost bins will soon be placed in school cafeterias. On Thursday, Energy Manager Phillip Williams picked up five compost bins from MassDEP and said he would be working with Ashland schools on how to use them in their dining halls.

More information on the commercial food waste ban, including tips for diverting food waste, can be found on the MassDEP website www.mass.gov/eea/agencies/massdep/recycle/reduce/food-waste-ban.html.

Amanda Beland can be contact at 508-626-3957 or abeland@wickedlocal.com. Follow her on Twitter @abelandMWDN